PDF Export

PDF export is supported by Xara Photo & Graphic Designer, Page & Layout Designer and Designer Pro.

The Portable Document Format (PDF) provides the best way to transfer drawings and document to others. The free Adobe PDF Reader is very popular and enables anyone to view and print your PDF document.

For very complex vector graphics, PDF can be very slow, so drawings that take a few seconds to draw in Xara can take minutes, especially when printing. So sometimes it's quicker to convert complex vector graphics into a bitmap before exporting your PDF.

PDF files are vector graphics files-which means they are resolution independent, and are great for printing on high resolution devices, and you can zoom in to view detail with no loss of quality. Your graphics or document exported as a PDF should look exactly like it does in Xara.

There are different versions of PDF, including a specialized version, known as PDF/X which was developed by the printing industry and has become a very popular way of transferring files for commercial printing.

Xara provides very comprehensive controls over many aspects of your PDF output. These are just some of the options and features you can control in Xara's PDF output. You can:

embed fonts in the file which means all readers can be sure of seeing the file exactly as you intend, but this makes the files larger. You can also select to embed only a subset of the fonts (only the used characters) to reduce the PDF file size;
set it to re-sample all images or photos to be any required resolution so they are not unnecessarily high resolution;
set it to convert bitmaps to JPEG or remain in their raw state;
make it so that layers in your Xara drawing are visible and can be switched on and off in Adobe Reader;
select which version of PDF or PDF/X file you want to create;
select which pages of a multi-page document are exported;
make your PDF file password protected;

even embed the original .xar file (or other files) into the PDF for the ultimate in document portability.

To make life easier all the options have been distilled down to four easy choices. When you export as a PDF you are presented with a choice of the following presets:

Draft quality.
Email distribution or Web download.
High quality.

Commercial printing (PDF/X) (Photo & Graphic Designer and Designer Pro only)

You can customize the settings of any of these presets by clicking the Advanced Options button.